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The Men Who Stare at Goats
Author Jon Ronson on C-SPAN 2
and in New York Times Book Review

"'The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead of chitchatting all over town about what they did.' So says retired Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the first of the many characters redolent of 'Dr. Strangelove' who are found in this jaw-dropper of a -- hard to believe, but, yes -- nonfiction story."
  -- New York Times Book Review of Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, 4/7/05

Dear friends,

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson is one of those rare, well received books, which reveals the depth of deception found within secret government projects. The New York Times book review below gives an idea of the depths which Ronson's engaging book plumbs. Ronson explores a strange world where US soldiers are trained to be psychic killers in these top secret projects. This may sound impossible to believe, yet I invite you to read the below Times book review and explore the links provided to reliable, verifiable information on this topic. Jon Ronson and The Men Who Stare at Goats was also featured on C-SPAN 2 on Sunday, May 15, 2005 at 1:30 PM Eastern Time (10:30 AM Pacific).

Though I have been reluctant to broach this topic in the past, thanks to the publicity raised by The Men Who Stare at Goats, I can now tell you that I have received abundant information about various psychic programs hidden beneath Byzantine layers of secrecy in government. WantToKnow.info team member Carol Rutz is a recovered survivor of MK-ULTRA and other secret programs where, among other duties, she was trained to be a psychic killer back in the 1960s. Read our summary of her engaging, well documented book A Nation Betrayed at the link below. By exploring this vital information and spreading the word on all that is being hidden from us, we can and will build a brighter future for us all.

With best wishes,
Fred Burks for WantToKnow.info

P.S. A big thank you to C-SPAN 2 for having the courage to air the Jon Ronson program, Dr. Griffin's lecture on the 9/11 cover-up, and more!


To order The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson and see reader's reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743241924/104-8413598-5658354?v=glance

10-page summary: Verifiable mind control information with 80 footnotes and many links to original sources:
https://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg

10-page summary: Carol Rutz' A Nation Betrayed details her experiences in secret mind control programs:
https://www.WantToKnow.info/nationbetrayed10pg

Verifiable information on mind control programs using sophisticated non-lethal weapons technology:
https://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrollers10pg#nonlethal
https://www.WantToKnow.info/bluebird10pg#nonlethal

Information on the government's secret psychic programs:
https://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrollers10pg#psychic


Link to the below New York Times book review of Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EFDD163EF934A35757C0A9639C8B63

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal's Heart

By JANET MASLIN
Published: April 7, 2005, Thursday

'The Men Who Stare at Goats'
By Jon Ronson
259 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.

At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is ''The Men Who Stare at Goats,'' the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, paranoid quacks who play mind games. He seems to have hit the mother lode.

Take the goats of the title: Mr. Ronson cites a hundred of them. He says that they have been hidden at a Goat Lab at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and de-bleated for security reasons.

They have been used in top-secret experiments by psychic spies whose existence is not officially acknowledged by the United States Army. Military psychics are so well hidden that they aren't covered by the Army's coffee budget. It makes them cranky to have to bring their own coffee to work.

''The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead of chitchatting all over town about what they did.'' So says retired Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the first of the many characters redolent of ''Dr. Strangelove'' who are found in this jaw-dropper of a -- hard to believe, but, yes -- nonfiction story.

Some of these experts contend that a goat's heart can be stopped by the intense gaze of a certain kind of supersoldier. ''Goat didn't have a chance,'' one of these tough guys tells Mr. Ronson. Such fighters sometimes refer to themselves as Jedi Warriors, because the thinking about their occult superpowers dates back to early ''Star Wars'' days. It was then that the post-Vietnam military, demoralized and fiscally hamstrung, was ready to try anything in the way of intangible new weaponry.

Mr. Ronson sets his book up beautifully. It moves with wry, precise agility from crackpot to crackpot in its search for the essence of this early New Age creativity. Much of it can be traced to the 1977 fact-finding mission of Lt. Col. Jim Channon, now also retired but given credit for an influential legacy.

It was Colonel Channon's 125-page ''First Earth Battalion Operations Manual'' that suggested a whole new approach to combat and a whole new type of military uniform. According to Colonel Channon's plan, soldiers' uniforms should include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools and loudspeakers that would emit ''indigenous music and words of peace.'' The author's explorations also take him to one soldier of fortune who died after ''acting too big for his boots regarding his superhuman powers,'' and to a New Age company alleged to be dealing in both healing bars (costing $7,600 and resembling blocks of soap) and group sex (''Don't tell your husband because he wouldn't understand the energy work'').

Then there are the double agents supposedly operating within the flying saucer set. ''The U.F.O. community?'' the author asks one source. ''Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?''

''Oh, Jon,'' the source tells him, delivering the kind of swift punch line that makes this book so entertaining. ''Don't be naïve.''

At this point, ''The Men Who Stare at Goats'' still concentrates on quirks, making it a smarter, nuttier version of ''The Tipping Point'' or ''Blink.'' But then it moves into a different realm. While Colonel Channon was asserting that the military should be ''unafraid to appear harebrained and half-baked in their pursuit of a new kind of weapon,'' a parallel and less theoretical set of experiments was unfolding. And Mr. Ronson addresses the more sinister aspect of out-of-the-box military thinking.

''The Men Who Stare at Goats'' turns into a book that connects dots. It sees a common thread in the use of screamingly bad music to assault Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama and the use of similar tactics in the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex. In these accounts, Mr. Ronson writes as much about schemes that were only contemplated as about the ones that actually made the cut.

For instance, he describes the effort to deploy a Moscow scientist who had previously sent subliminal messages to Red Army troops (''Do not get drunk before battle'') in the Branch Davidian standoff. This scientist didn't work out because he was unwilling to transmit words spoken by Charlton Heston as a bogus voice of God.

Mr. Ronson, a filmmaker and journalist whose earlier book, ''Them: Adventures With Extremists,'' was also outstandingly artful and chilling, eventually follows his trail of bread crumbs to the realms that really matter. He finds a prologue in MK-ULTRA, the real C.I.A. ''Manchurian Candidate'' research of the 1950's, which involved the disastrous use of LSD as a potential truth serum. He follows this line of thinking through and beyond the fruitcake innovations of the 1970's, concluding that Colonel Channon's theories ''could be used to shatter people rather than heal them.''

''Those are the ideas that live on in the War on Terror,'' he adds.

Inevitably, this account extends to the tactics of American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And somehow Mr. Ronson is able to keep his book both light and nightmarish. (Asked if there was a single good thing to be said about the prison, one former guard says it was an address to which Amazon.com delivered.)

Absurdity is never far away. Discussing the weird tricks played on prisoners in both Iraq and Cuba, he finds the English journalist Martin Bashir interviewing one former captive. Mr. Bashir asks whether the prisoner saw his now-notorious Michael Jackson documentary. ''Jamal replied, 'I've, uh, been in Guantánamo Bay for two years.'''

Mr. Ronson, who lives in London and exclaims the occasional ''bloody hell'' at these discoveries, remains terrifically adept at capturing the horror of these developments without losing track of their lunacy. About propaganda dropped from airplanes: ''The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets.'' Early in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, he says, Iraqi psychological warfare meant telling American soldiers: ''Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.''

Published: 04 - 07 - 2005 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 1 , Page 9

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